There is increased interest in the development and deployment of renewable energy systems comprising solar energy, wind turbine energy, tidal energy, geothermal energy, and the like, or to distributed energy generation systems comprising waste-to-energy generation systems, fuel cells, microturbines, diesel generators, and the like. This interest is being driven by a number of factors including a limited supply of fossil fuels, increased pollution from the acquisition and use of fossil fuels, global warming considerations, rising costs of fossil fuels, the loss of natural lands due to the construction of fossil fuel power plants, continued utility grid degradation and blackouts, unpredictable energy prices, the need for local power generation in disaster recovery situations, the need to move away from centralized power plants to distributed energy systems for homeland security, and the like. Advancements in the development of renewable energy and distributed energy generation technologies have overcome earlier impediments such as poor efficiency, installation difficulty, high cost, high maintenance, and the like and are presently offering increasingly attractive alternatives to fossil fuel power systems in the generation and delivery of electric power.
One of the issues faced by the renewable energy and distributed energy generation industries is that the adoption and deployment of such systems is often sporadic and not well coordinated. The decision to invest in and install a renewable energy or distributed energy generation system is typically made at the individual entity level rather than as a planned activity for an entire community. For economy of language, in this context, an “entity” may comprise an individual, a company, an office building, a shopping mall, a shopping center, a sports complex, or other such organization, business, or group investing collectively in a source of energy. Consequently, the renewable energy and distributed energy generation industries often lack the coordinated, integrated infrastructure that is typically common in other industries. The lack of infrastructure inhibits the adoption and installation of new renewable energy and distributed energy generation systems and does not allow these industries to gain advantages due to cooperation or economies of scale to lower costs, increase acceptance and deployment, and attract additional investment capital.
Accordingly, there is a need for further developments in methods and systems to facilitate the connection and cooperation of the wide variety of entities and individual implementations of renewable energy or distributed energy generation systems to improve efficiencies, lower costs, facilitate new services, facilitate management and improvement of the energy production and distribution system as a whole, facilitate and improve training and education, facilitate energy commerce, and the like. In particular, there is a need for improved systems and methods to improve and enhance the education activities and increase the awareness of students in the field of renewable energy.